


What Does it Mean, to Live?

by sturmfreii



Category: Pandora Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 05:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2217732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sturmfreii/pseuds/sturmfreii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is something unique to every individual, and is something Lacie Baskerville has yet to lay her hands on. No answer is befitting of her, no response or written word has yet to fill her soul with the comfort of acceptance. She’s drifted between answers, until she finds it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Does it Mean, to Live?

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by prompt #4 of ph-fanfest.
> 
> I apologize for the lack of new, RECENT works, since most of my current entries seem like old recycled ones. I promise I'll pull something new out soon. I'm taking my time, for once.
> 
> Lastly; a few additional notes at the end on Lacie herself.

Life. A state of being, one that distinguishes animals and plants from the inorganic material that scatters the world—the existence of said animal or human being. Lacie has brushed her fingertips over the word in countless novels, books, dictionaries, and wondered to herself. What does it mean to live? People claim you have not lived if you haven’t experienced something, they claim you are alive simply by breathing, or by ‘living’ your life to the fullest. 

It’s a funny little word, one that used to stare back at her and laugh at her confusion. Life is something unique to every individual, and is something Lacie Baskerville has yet to lay her hands on. No answer is befitting of her, no response or written word has yet to fill her soul with the comfort of acceptance. At the age of twelve, she begins to watch these ‘living’ human beings from her own little bubble, and observes their behavior. Glen claims living is simply standing and breathing; a purely scientific ‘life’. An author claims living includes purpose (something she entirely lacks, despite Glen’s constant and mindless repetitions of Jury—a Child of Misfortune.), the Baskerviles claim living is serving. 

Oswald believes living is duty. At age thirteen, her heart ached, and it was all she could do to watch her brother grow distant and fall into the distinct repetition of duty, duty, duty. It’s all that woman’s fault, Jury, who implanted the sense of duty and obedience in her brother. That cannot be living! How is such a life of obedience, duty, service, even _living_  at all?  _It’s got nothing to do with actually being alive, it’s just_  how _you live your life!_ she thinks, stubbornly.  _All they do is preach to obey, to serve, to conform—that’s not it That isn’t living!_

Then what is life? 

At age fifteen, she runs away from home for the first time. It’s a leap of faith that makes her heart pound just remembering; one that fills her with adrenaline and makes her squeal with joy in the night as she ran. It was then she realizes, as she runs barefoot across the snowy ground and out of the Baskerville manor, that this was life. Life was not only an existence, but it was a sensation—one that fills the human body with an unearthly sensation of omniscience. It’s a four letter word that encompasses the thrill of freedom with a beating heart and a swelling sense of confidence. 

Sixteen. Lacie runs through the streets in a sheet white dress, snow falling and feet freezing as her heart beats to the rythm of her feet hitting the earth. Again, she feels life, the swell and the confidence and the sheer freedom it holds. Life comes to her in spirits, filling her world with color whenever she escapes her monochrome existence back at the Baskervilles. By the day, the color drains from those blood red cloaks, from her brother’s vibrant violet eyes and Glen’s rotting skin. Her world shifts from color to grays, to red and blues and greens while she walks in freedom about Sablier.

A boy is dyed in red, with blood trickling out of his mouth as he coughs into his pale white hand. A woman is dyed blue as tears escape her cheeks, and young man is encompassed in yellow as he stares up at the sun. In the summertime, there are so many colors to be seen and found that it hurts Lacie’s eyes—it’s harder to pick out the real life from the false one of all the obnoxiously bright clothes. It only mimics true life, the ones that people put on a facade for and associate only with the seasons. Winter on the other hand, makes a clean canvas—with true colors strewn across the stretched canvas, regardless of their connotation. 

Sixteen. A young man with vibrant green eyes stares back at her as she asks him his name, his hair dirty blond and his skin pale white. He carries dull colors, ones that intrigue her to a point of fascination—such a brilliant emerald green does not mix with a rotten black curled up inside his lungs. His name was Jack, an enigma to Lacie as he was to the rest of the world. He did not fit in with the false colors in the summer, nor the true ones in the winter. He shifts in palettes, to blend in to breathe his own air as he is left in silence on the street corners. As he sleeps, she counts how many breaths he takes. 

One, two, three. He is just like her; an outcast within such a strange and unique world of colors and appearances and life. Four, five, six. He does not belong in either world. Seven…eight…nine. Lacie knows she does not really belong to either world—she does not belong in the world of the living. Ten…eleven…then twelve. Her answer to that age old question still alludes her, despite the spurts of life she lives when she runs from home—to freedom. What is life? What does it mean to live?

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. She’s stopped running from her monochrome home, and realized with the coming years that it all seemed futile. Death will knock her doorstep regardless if she’s twenty five or if she’s sixty two. Running from her place in this world will give her freedom, yet only for a spurt of time. Life is not splotched—Lacie realized this as she ran through the streets of Sablier with Jack. It fleshes out and grows, and extends over any number of days—even weeks. That answer she grew used to had to be discarded, her quest put back to square one. 

Jury still whispers in her ear, Oswald’s eyes grow dimmer and Glen’s skin has begun peeling at the muscle like flakes of pastry. Rather than specks of color, reasons to smile ad to laugh so easily, her life had stayed in monochrome. Lacie finds it odd. It makes her want to tear at her chest and tear herself to bits with all that disappointment and turmoil, and it makes her thoughts run rampant at night. There might never be an answer to her question of life—all she can rely on is the word that used to laugh at her on the pages of all those library books.

It still laughs at her, in it’s black inky haze of color on the moldy yellow pages.

Twenty three. A man in garb stands playing an authentic instrument from the Barma’s home country, and is surrounded in vibrant colors. A sharp, crisp dark green of his robes, the shocking white of his bow and the smokey brown of the instrument under flesh colored fingertips. A hint of golden blonde strikes her eye from under the hood, and shocks her when emerald green eyes lock with her own. That splurge of life, eight years old, has once again stepped into her world of forced seclusion and monochrome. Jack was older, but he still had the same smile he did back then, and carried such vibrancy with him that she realizes he’s found his answer to what life is. 

While she is still lost. He smiles and watches her as if she’s a goddess, and seems so whole and complete just with her standing beside him that she feels his color radiating off him. Jack laughs and moves with such a grace to him that she follows in suit, and is swallowed up in rich colors once again. Yet, the months tick by, and the grandfather clock in her room counts down, not up. 

Her words felt false against her lips, and she wonders if she even sounds convincing while she speaks. A week from now, an important ceremony, goodbye. Lacie walks as his back is turned away from her, and he marches back home towards life and she marches towards death. It was a funny thing, how death was all she headed towards her whole life—just sooner than others. It seems to be her only solid solution, no matter how she views it now; the Baskervilles are lifeless and devoid of life, while the world outside is at constant battle with the real and fake. Her perceived view of life is being twisted like taffy, just looking at it. 

Then that inky, black haze. Jack harbored the same thing when she found him shivering in the snow, and it begins to grow and fester away at her insides. Ice cold air fills her lungs, and she wraps the blanket tighter around her frame. Such  _anger_! Lacie had her answer to that age old question, she was content with it—then he showed up. He smiled and laughed and danced through her life for four months of real color. In the darkness, golden lights flickering around her frame, she realizes how this is all his fault; how he gave her life when he himself was not.

It was his fault she began to doubt once again. Marching towards Death did not feel right, in her last few days; it felt so fake and hollow—just like Oswald’s eyes. Her body felt hollow and empty despite having something growing in her womb. All the chess pieces fall into place, yet she still feels out of place on the board as queen. Her doubt is a black haze that continue to eat her insides even as she moves across the threshold of the room. 

Twenty four. His fingers feel cold against her forehead as he reads off her sins; his eyes are a dull violet, no longer filled with color. Glen’s—or rather, Levi’s skin is pale white and peeling at the bone under the bandages, his eyes sickly and smile warped from the years of service and duty. Oswald—or, rather, Glen will now follow in those footsteps, rotting from their twisted views of what life is. 

What is life? What does it mean to exist? 

Even as the chains grip her arms, she finds the age old question grip her soul and drag her down to her knees. It hurts, and ripples of pain spread all throughout her body, but she doesn’t make a sound. Death is not the answer. Baskervilles’ views aren’t it, nor is the world outside in Sablier. There is no answer. It’s so simple an answer that it makes a laugh escape her lips. 

There is _no_  answer! “Haha…hahaha! Brother!” she calls out to Glen, who looks at her in surprise through the black shadows surrounding her and pulling her under. A grin erupts on her face, and she clenches her fists as she feels herself fall.  _Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on._

"I love life!" the words bubble out of her lips, the last ones she feels she’ll ever utter, "I love it, brother!" 

**Author's Note:**

> I always wondered what Lacie had said to Oswald, in her final moments in the world of Pandora Hearts; before she was dragged into the Abyss. The speech bubble was completely covered by noise, and it seemed like only Oswald heard what she had said before she was cast away for good. It's a firm belief of mine that she said that she loved life--rather than any mention to her deal with Glen/Levi, or about Jack.
> 
> Lacie's one of those characters that always fascinates me, and that I always try to wrap my head around. She's extraordinarily well constructed for a character that had such little panel time in the manga. I feel in the wrong to even place her in a category--for I feel she truly doesn't have one. She fits into so many other niches and pockets of the world that she's created her own.
> 
> My love for her is strong.


End file.
